Turns out we have all been dead for over a decade. So what are we arguing about? Holdren wrote this in 1969.

World food production must double in the period 1965-2000 to stay even; it must triple if nutrition is to be brought up to minimum requirements. That there is insufficient additional, good quality agricultural land available in the world to meet these needs is so well documented (Borgstrom, 1965) that we will not belabor the point here.

Then he went into a long diatribe about how we are going to run out of water, energy, food, land – and that the heat from nuclear power plants is going to destroy the climate.

A more easily evaluated problem is the tremendous quantity of waste heat generated at nuclear installations (to say nothing of the usable power output, which, as with power from whatever source, must also ultimately be dissipated as heat). Both have potentially disastrous effects on the local and world ecological and climatological balance.

This guy must be the life of the party. After a dozen pages of psychotic disaster prediction, he gets to the punch line. He wants to snip men’s private parts.

If we may safely rule out circumvention of the Second Law or the divorce of energy requirements from population size, this suggests that, whatever science and technology may accomplish, population growth must be stopped.

But it cannot be emphasized enough that if the population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.’0 Therefore, confronted as we are with limited resources of time and money, we must consider carefully what fraction of our effort should be applied to the cure of the disease itself instead of to the temporary relief of the symptoms. We should ask, for example, how many vasectomies could be performed by a program funded with the 1.8 billion dollars required to build a single nuclear agro-industrial complex, and what the relative impact on the problem would be in both the short and long terms. The decision for population control will be opposed by growth-minded economists and businessmen, by nationalistic statesmen, by zealous religious leaders, and by the myopic and well-fed of every description. It is therefore incumbent on all who sense the limitations of technology and the fragility of the environmental balance to make themselves heard above the hollow, optimistic chorus-to convince society and its leaders that there is no alternative but the cessation of our irresponsible, all-demanding, and all-consuming population growth.

In other words, he proposed forced sterilization based on his hare-brained theories. His reward for being dangerous, wrong and anti-democratic? Obama made him his science advisor.

17 Responses to Holdren 1969 : The Science Is Settled – Everyone Starving Before The Year 2000

Oh, I’m voting all right. And I’m contributing heavily. And we cannot stop with this election, or the next one. We need to strip all Eco-wacko legislation from federal, state, and local law. We need a moratorium on enviro litigation harrassment.

Almost all of their failed predictions are based on assuming that
things are static that are, in actuality, static.
This is one of the major reasons they are wrong so much of the time.
That is why we are not starving, NYC is not flooded, etc.

“Almost all of their failed predictions are based on assuming that
things are static that are, in actuality, static.”
Dynamic damnit.
They assume that things are static , which in reality, are dynamic.
There is no reason to assume that energy production and transportation would not improve,just like the food production.

I’m a Malthus fan.
Some things are static and some are not. The Earth’s mass and surface area are (fairly) constant. Opposition to population control originates in overgeneralization. Laissez faire works better than State (government, generally) control of most economic decisions. It fails when population is concerned, for reasons clearly stated by Garrett Hardin in his __Science__ essay “The Tragedy of the Commons”.

The starvation that occurs in the world is not due to lack of food because of over population. It is due to insufficient distribution of food, which already exists.

I guess if you’re a guy like Erlich or Holdren you would conclude that those impoverished people wouldn’t suffer from starvation if they didn’t exist in the first place even though there is excess food capacity.

The fact that these “czars” in the White House are even there in the first place, is due to the Congress looking the other way– the new Congress had better start dragging them in front of investigative committee after investigative committee– and keep that going, perpetually, if necessary– it is their turn for multi-anal exams………

While Holdren is wrong about “global warming/climate change”, and some of his solutions to the world’s problems are extreme, one cannot deny that poplulation control is an important issue that needs to be discussed rationally. The European nations have essentially zero population growth and that has resulted in a marked improvement in their standard of living. Imagine what China would have been like withour their population control over the last 50 years.
The problem is real despite Holdren’s faulty predictions and his extreme solutions.
Obama clearly made a mistake in selecting him as his science advisor, but the solution is to remove him as science advisor and replace him by someone who can deal with issues objectively. Replacing Obama by the likes of Bush and his war-mongering liars is an extreme solution that would really damage the nation.